In U.S. Pat. No. 4,314,347 for "Seismic Signal Processing Machine and Method for Noise Removal", J. E. Stokely describes a processing method in which the effect of noise bursts in seismic traces are reduced by determining the power level of signals recorded during a seismic survey, over a succession of time windows along the entire trace and then removing those portions of the signal which deviate from the remainder by unacceptable amounts. That is, after the power level of each trace is generated over a time window, the latter is compared to a minimum power level and then zeroed if less than that minimum. Next, an average power level of the remaining traces is found and the aforementioned previously calculated power level is compared to the calculated average for the time window. Comparison is based on statistics: the power level must not exceed a multiple of the standard deviation of the power levels of the remaining traces. That is, if the power level of the trace of interest, exceeds a multiple the average of the remaining traces, it is probably a noise burst and is zeroed. The time window is then incremented and process repeated, until the entire trace has been examined.
While the use of the power spectrum and similar processing methods to eliminate noise bursts in traces may be acceptable in small batch operations, (i.e., in processing say 24- to 48-trace records), it is impractical in processing recordings collected by large multichannel seismic systems, as are now being provided by today's geophysical service companies; i.e., records involving at least 96 traces per record, say preferably between 240 and 1000 channels of data per source activation. This is especially true where prior art signal processing requires full trace treatment (along the entire time extent of each trace) as well as full group treatment (in an orthogonal direction to the time axis, viz., associated with a common group coordinate, a common shot coordinate, a common offset coordinate, etc.)